Team: MM

Our problem was to design a solution to fight fake news. 

"The best way to fight fake news is to highlight it"

Keeping this in mind we emphasized on highlighting the fake news, just to avoid it.

Inferences we made from survey:

• More than 50% of the population we surveyed seriously consider circulation of fake news as problem.
• Half of the population believe that they usually receive fake news from one or the other medium.
• About 85% of the population think that their near and dear ones receive fake news very often.
• More than 90% of the population believe that the major source of fake news for then is social media, majorly Facebook and WhatsApp.
• We asked user where do you usually encounter fake news, majority of the population said it WhatsApp and Facebook. A significant amount of population believe blogs and news articles itself are the source of fake news.
• About 5/6 of the population do not use any technology based solution to avoid fake news.
• The answers we got about which app people usually use to avoid fake news are not the apps that actually solve the problem. Answers we got are InShorts, TOI, etc.
• About 90% of the population prefer to avoid any fake news they encounter.
• Significant amount of population is willing to use any tool which can report and filter every kind of fake news they encounter.
• Half of the population if happy to report any kind of fake news they encounter if any kind of incentive is given to them.

Changes made in high fidelity prototype:

We redesigned the logo to make it look more similar to the context of the problem.

1. Then we changed a bit in the browser extension: 

• We redesigned the whole interface to keep it in accordance to Google's material design specification.

• We didn't have any option to "undo" any deletions we made in the original content of the website. So we now have an option to "undo" that.

         Link to Hi-Fi prototype for browser 

2. Minor changes in the stand alone app:

• Instead of just keeping a boundary along the fake news, we text highlighted the fake news with red color which was faded within seconds. We just want the user to know that what exactly is the fake news. We didn't want to so boldly highlight the fake news. We avoided over emphasis on that so that uses should be distracted from his main task.

          Link to Hi-Fi prototype for stand alone app

3. Feature for WhatsApp:

• This feature was already well thought out so not much changes were made even after re-iterating on that. All we ended up doing is manipulating the color scheme.

• Second thing we did was, we created a positive feedback for the user when they end up reporting a fake news, and an "undo" button as a cherry on the cake.

          Link to Hi-Fi prototype fot WhatsApp feature

How will we keep the users active in our application:

Our application include a browser extension, an stand-alone application and an extended feature for whatsapp. The user just have to make effort only once, while installing the browser extension. The user is always getting our service until he himself disables it. Whenever a user encounters any fake news, we show some kind of alert and mark the fake news in red, by different ways for different platforms .Thus the user has to make no extra effort in viewing any fake message.

Video on this